Obama to Get Back BlackBerry at Last, Toughened by NSA

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Obama to Get Back BlackBerry at Last, Toughened by NSA

The presidential CrackBerry is undergoing final testing before being handed back. The NSA is hammering on the SecurVoice software which has been loaded onto the Obama-phone and is in the last stages of testing just how secure it might be.

The BlackBerry is an 8830, the standard business handset, but the added software encrypts both calls and messages. Cellphone calls are encrypted anyway, but there are some back doors if you know where to find them (and of course, the NSA knows exactly where they are).

The company behind the SecurVoice software is Genesis Key, which is handily based in Washington DC. Be careful not to confuse this with spam-alike secure-voice.com, whose site reads, rather unconvincingly, thus: “The development of the Secure Voice lasts from 2001 and we have now a wide range of devices as well as Landline version of the solution.”

Since winning the election, President Obama has been limping along with two devices — a standard BlackBerry and a secured handset called the Sectera Edge, an unwieldy device that not only offers encrypted communications but is also so ugly that nobody would ever want to steal it. Both machines need to be tethered to each other to work, making every presidential e-mail look something like a game of Wii Boxing.

If the NSA tests come up clean, he could have his customised BlackBerry in his hands soon, which in governmental terms means a couple of months. And of course, secure communications aren’t much good if the person you are talking to is an open and easy target. To this end, Mrs. O should be getting one, too.

The odd fact is that the NSA usually likes everybody else to be locked out but itself. Giving the SecurVoice such a big endorsement will either mean that the encryption is indeed unbreakable (and therefore fit for the president) or that it wants everybody to think that it is unbreakable, therefore giving the NSA back-door access to every single SecurVoice customer. Paranoid conspiracy theory? Hell yes. Accurate speculation? Maybe.